Research documents Forfattere "Jacobsen, Michael"

Re-Conceptualising Notions of Chinese-ness in a Southeast Asian Business cum Societal Context

Jacobsen, Michael(København, 2006)

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This paper explores the role of the Chinese in a Southeast Asian business cum societal context; from different approaches towards Chinese-ness over different notions of intra- and inter-ethnic relation ending up with a critique of the idea of a Chinese diaspora in a Southeast Asian context. The paper furthermore argues that a culturalist reading of Southeast Asian Chinese modes of engaging in capitalist practices and societal entrenchments constitute a deception that produces a variety of stereotypes of Chinese-ness thus disregarding the complexity and dynamic developments within the ethnic Chinese community region-wise. Finally, in relation to Chinese business practices in a Southeast Asian context the paper suggests that cultural notions of guanxi and xinyong do not form a basis for doing business the Chinese way, only options, that intra-ethnic relations do not play an important role in transnational Chinese linkages, and that contemporary conceptions of Chinese identity are always negotiated with the dominant ‘other’ so as to secure the construction of an economic ‘room’ or space from where business can be conducted in an overall societal acceptable manner.
Key words: Ethnic Chinese, diaspora, entrepreneurship, ethnicity, identity

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Identity formation is probably one of the most discussed aspects of strategic positioning within anthropology, sociology and political science. In general notions of identity have been based on either an absolutist or primordial understanding of belonging or a constructionalist view in which social and political positioning in terms of identity formation are governed by a given societal context. This paper bases its understanding of identity formation on the latter approach. This means that depending of context individuals have several different although related identities to choose between when manoeuvring in a complex and dynamic social environment. Identity formation, achieved or ascribed, and its various forms of externalisation are thus negotiated and not absolute. The dynamic behind this notion of identity formation is individual agency strategically manipulating social, economic and political positioning in a given societal setup. To illustrate the complexities and in this case negative ramifications of social engineering the article focuses on inter-ethnic relations and industrial development in Penang, Malaysia.

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Assessing the Impact of Global Economics on Industrial Developments and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Penang, Malaysia

Jacobsen, Michael(Frederiksberg, 2010)

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Due to the increasingly integration and thus inter-dependency between the global economy, a given national economy and their societal embedment a triangulation between the three elements is a must if one is to understand the dynamic processes between them. This article focuses especially on the national economic and societal aspects of such a triangulation thus positioning the national dependencies of the global economy in the background. The notion of triangulation is perceived by the author to be more holistic and relational oriented compared to an approach based on decoupling. The latter aims through sector defined studies to assess the level of connectivity between global and national economics as well as between them and their societal embedment in order to detect whether there are potential fault-lines between the three thus mitigating the notion of decoupling. This article applies a triangular approach on the electronic and electrical manufacturing sector in Penang. It concentrates in particular on how companies within this sector relate to pertinent governmental initiated industry policies and the impact of the inter-ethnic related affirmative action policy in this connection. The global aspect of the triangulation has thus been put on a back burner in this study, as the article emphasises the importance of pointing towards the inter-dependency between the political, the inter-ethnic and the economic sectors in Penang, as they are perceived to condition each other.

This paper argues that the fluidity that permeates the contemporary international community is driven by especially political and economic globalisation, which has a huge impact of the relationship between the nation and the state. As the individual nation state is increasingly depending on the international community for its economic survival this dependency on the global has as a consequence that it rolls back aspects of national sovereignty thus opening up the national hinterland for further international influences. These developments initiate a process of disaggregating state and nation, meaning that a gradual disarticulation of the relationship between state and nation produces new societal spaces, which are contested by non-statist interest groups and transnational more or less deterritorialised ethnic affiliated groups and networks. The argument forwarded in this article is that the ethnic Chinese utilises these newly created spaces for setting up diasporic like networks thus providing substance for transnational ethnoscapes or nations without states.
Keywords: globalisation, nation state, diaspora, ethnicity, Chinese, Southeast Asia

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We argue, due to the conspicuous failure of Washington Consensus-guided
reforms in most part of the developing world in 1990s and the outbreak of the
current global financial crisis, Washington Consensus, as a general term of the
neoliberal free market economic thinking, has been withering. In the meantime,
Chinese economic model has gain wide recognition and praise worldwide.
Joshua C. Ramo coined the term of Beijing Consensus as an alternative
approach to economic development for developing nations. There has been hot
debate on the notion of Beijing Consensus. We argue even though there are
some problems in Ramo’s original definition of Beijing Consensus, we should
not reject this notion altogether. Instead, we should try to come up with better
conceptualizations of this term. In this paper, we sum up ten general principles
of the Chinese development model as our new definition of the Beijing
Consensus.